Notes

Written by JD Davenport, who still sells for a living. Updated 4 November 2026.

Short pieces on contracting operations: job costing, appointments, production and how people get paid. 4 of them, each making one argument on its own page.

A note is one argument. It opens with the claim, gives the reasoning, and stops. There is no series to follow and no order to read them in, because each one is written to be understood without the others.

They come from two places. Some are drawn from the two books, rebuilt to stand alone rather than lifted out of a chapter. Others are findings from live audit work, written up when something turns out not to be what it looked like.

Where a note states a number, it carries the window it covers and the basis it was measured on. Where something could not be measured cleanly, the note says so rather than estimating around the gap.

• A checklist is not a gate A check a person runs is a checklist. A check that must return zero before a file saves is a gate. Only the second one survives a busy week.
• Check the thermometer before you check the business A broken instrument does not return an error. It returns a confident answer, in the right format, at the usual time, and you act on it.
• The number was right. The population was wrong. A figure computed correctly on the wrong set of records looks exactly like a figure computed correctly. The most expensive mistake in job costing.
• Why the same problem keeps coming back A problem that returns every quarter is not a problem. It is an output, and the thing producing it has not been touched. Here is the test.

Longer answers to single questions are on the questions page. The full method is in the books and the kits.